Carl Rollyson, Author at Simply Charly

George Washington: The Political Rise of America’s Founding Father

By Carl Rollyson
June 13, 2024
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With so many biographies of George Washington available, it is not so much a matter of having something new to say but approaching the subject from a singular perspective: a biography with a thesis. David O. Stewart, the author of well-received biographical studies of Aaron Burr...

Philip Roth

Literature Philip Roth Reviews

By Carl Rollyson
June 7, 2024
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Philip Roth: The Biography by Blake Bailey Philip Roth: A Counterlife by Ira Nadel A biography of Philip Roth (1933-2018) might begin ála Dickens: It was the best of lives; it was the worst of lives. Winner of the National Book Award for his first...

Three-Martini Lunches at the Ritz: The Rebellion of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton Literature Reviews Sylvia Plath

By Carl Rollyson
June 1, 2024
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Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton in Robert Lowell’s poetry class in Boston are the stuff of lore, fostered by Sexton’s rollicking report, including how she would park in the loading zone of the Ritz and say it was okay because they were going to get...

A Worse Place Than Hell: How the Civil War Battle of Fredericksburg Changed a Nation

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Reviews Walt Whitman

By Carl Rollyson
May 24, 2024
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John Matteson, Distinguished Professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and her Father, is steeped in nineteenth-century literature and biography, and is also the author of the...

The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War

Literature Reviews William Faulkner

By Carl Rollyson
April 16, 2024
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Michael Gorra, Mary Augusta Jordan Professor of English Language and Literature at Smith College, and editor of the Norton Critical Edition of As I Lay Dying (1930), is well prepared to take on the subject of William Faulkner and the Civil War. He has read...

Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

Literature Reviews Sylvia Plath

By Carl Rollyson
April 12, 2024
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Heather Clark, Professor of Contemporary Poetry at the University of Huddersfield, and author of The Grief of Influence: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (2011), announces in a prologue her intention to “debunk the sensational and melodramatic rhetoric that surrounds” Plath and “finally, to examine her...

Defending the Public’s Enemy

Politics Ramsey Clark Reviews

By Carl Rollyson
March 29, 2024
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To call Ramsey Clark (1927-), Attorney General in Lyndon Johnson’s administration, and one of the principal architects of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, a controversial subject, is an understatement. How to explain the volte face of a public figure who out of office defended America’s...

Thaddeus Stevens: Civil War Revolutionary, Fighter for Racial Justice

Reviews Thaddeus Stevens

By Carl Rollyson
February 8, 2024
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Bruce Levine, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Illinois and an award-winning author of books on the Civil War, quotes French statesman Georges Clemenceau observing Thaddeus Stevens (1792-1868) nearing the end of his life, with his illness “progressing rapidly but his energies mounting...

His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, A Life

Jimmy Carter Politics Reviews

By Carl Rollyson
January 31, 2024
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The author of well-received and best-selling books about Franklin D. Roosevelt and Barack Obama, a seasoned political analyst on MSNBC and earlier on Newsweek, Jonathan Alter summons a well informed and fresh perspective on the thirty-ninth President of the United States, taking advantage of new...

Tom Stoppard: A Life

Philosophy Reviews Tom Stoppard

By Carl Rollyson
December 24, 2023
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Hermione Lee, an award-winning biographer, best known for her biographies of Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, and Penelope Fitzgerald, hazards this time a biography of a living figure, a protean playwright with a penchant for denigrating biography. Like Tom Stoppard’s previous biographer, Ira Bruce Nadel, Lee...

George Washington: The Political Rise of America’s Founding Father

Philip Roth

Three-Martini Lunches at the Ritz: The Rebellion of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton

A Worse Place Than Hell: How the Civil War Battle of Fredericksburg Changed a Nation

The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War

Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

Defending the Public’s Enemy

Thaddeus Stevens: Civil War Revolutionary, Fighter for Racial Justice

His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, A Life

Tom Stoppard: A Life

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Healing the Broken Mind: Transforming America’s Failed Mental Health System

Kant’s Theory of Evil: An Essay on the Dangers of Self-love and the Aprioricity of History

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